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Whilst I realise that this is an area that has debate surrounding best practice, I've been led to believe that using form labels within a <dt> tag and inputs within <dd> validates as these tags are allowed to contain inline elements.

Maybe my question is CSS orientated as much as markup; as you can probably tell I'm fairly new to all this. It seems like it should be fairly straight forward to display elements as follows, only I'm uncertain how to achieve it without some form of wrapper, any advice?

In practice, this may cause some problems. IIRC, the screen reader Window-Eyes won't work properly if you nest the inputs within the labels. Therefore, you may have to wrap each label/input pair in a DIV:

I don't disagree with you on definition lists, I have no real opinion, I just would prefer my HTML to be as accessible as possible. I'm currently using a programatic form implementation (Zend_Form) and it uses a definition list wrapper as a default decorator. I was hoping to avoid changing it, but it seems thats not possible.